Haunted (17 page)

The biggest unknown of all was what, exactly, was terrorizing Cooper. I felt totally and completely at a loss, except for the obvious – it wasn't alive. I sighed outwardly, the pounding resuming in my head. I spoke to myself for a while, thinking that maybe something would come to mind if I actually brainstormed out loud. It was an epic failure. I even tried talking to Scarlet; she had been the one to figure out that it was a haunting in the first place, maybe she could figure out by what. Unfortunately for me, I hadn't figured out how to hear her in my thoughts as she could hear me in hers; maybe it wasn't possible to start with.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples again. Hours had passed and I felt I was no clearer on things than when I started. I pushed the paper to the side, frustrated with my stasis. I wondered if I'd ever have a drama-free life again.

As the thought passed through my mind, it was shoved aside by an eerie, sickening feeling – the one I always got when Cooper was being haunted.

I whirled around in my seat, hoping to see something, while secretly praying nothing would be there.

“Where are you?” I called out, searching the room with my eyes to no avail. I got up and started stalking around to see if the feeling got stronger anywhere in the room. It did. It was, however, on the move. To the outside observer, I'd have looked completely unhinged, and frankly was starting to feel that way. I was dodging from the front of the store to the back, jumping up, stooping down, and tucking into corners as though I was hoping to trap whatever it was.

I was most unsuccessful.

“What do you want?” I yelled.

No answer. Again.

Suddenly, the unsettling feeling crashed into the back of me so hard that I was convinced the “ghost” was trying to go through me. I shuddered at the possibility.

“You don't frighten me.”

Lie.

“I'm going to find out what you are,” I boasted. “And then I'm going to eliminate you.”

I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to do that, but it sounded good to me at the time and made me feel empowered. Maybe I really will.

The reaction to my bravado was extremely unpleasant. The pressure in the room started increasing and I felt like my head was going to explode, as if I had needed help with that. The vice grip was clamping down and I winced in pain, unable to move away from whatever was causing it.

I've gotta get out…

I dropped to the ground and crawled toward the front door. Crazy or not, I wasn't staying in the shop for one more second and if that meant walking out into the downtown streets on my hands and knees, I was fine with it. The pressure eventually had me down on my belly doing an inelegant army crawl. As I attempted to escape, the awareness of why Cooper turned to drugs was beyond apparent; I'd only endured five minutes but would have sold my right arm to make it stop. Luckily for me I didn't have to – it just disappeared. No slow recession, no last punch in the gut before leaving; it just plain old vanished. I couldn't have been more pleased.

I stayed face down on the hardwood floor, patting down my skull to be sure there weren't any new indentations. Completely oblivious to where I was, I continued that activity for a while until the bells of the entrance sang, snapping me out of my ridiculous compulsive behavior. In strolled a very early, and very befuddled, Peyta.

22

“Ruby,” she said with an edge of curious condescension. “I can think of about a million captions to go along with this picture, all of which are award winning for sure, but I'd really rather you just tell me why you're laying face down in the middle of the store. If you can that is.”

I was looking up, extending only my neck to see her. I smiled, realizing that if she hadn't been the classy kid she was, a picture of me plastered to the floor of my shop would have ended up on the internet for sure. After I peeled myself off of the knotty pine floor and dusted myself off, I made a mental note to mop the floor before leaving. Ghost or no ghost, I needed to have a presentable space.

“There was, uh, an incident,” I said, hesitating to find the right words. “Our not-so-friendly ghost was here again while I was alone.”

Her expression darkened as I filled her in on the basics of what had occurred. I tried to pretty it up as much as I could to keep the creepy factor down, but she needed the facts. Kid or not, Peyta was on that thing’s radar and she deserved to be kept in the know.

As I pondered how best to keep that delicate balance in the future, something hit me – maybe people weren’t being haunted at all. Maybe it was the space. Maybe my building had something dormant attached to it until Cooper showed up. He did have an uncanny knack for being mildly irritating at times, and maybe Casper the unfriendly ghost just wasn't having it. I shared my idea with Peyta who seemed to think the idea had merit.

“It's totally plausible,” she informed me. “When my mom and I were moving around a lot, back when I was a kid, we lived in about a dozen different places. At least a couple of them had entities attached to the home, or a room.”

Interesting…

“So what did you do? I mean, can anything be done at all?”

“Depends,” she answered, sounding mildly aloof.

“On?”

“On what it is, and why it's there,” she said, pulling a lollipop from her knapsack and unwrapping it slowly.

“And how would one venture to gain such information?” I asked, mildly perturbed. I didn't like having to drag conversation out of people.

“Depends,” she said with a shrug, popping the sucker in her mouth.

“Say 'depends' one more time and I'm leaving you at home alone while Cooper and I check into a hotel for the night.”

“It depe—” she said, cutting herself off before saying the “d” word. “It revolves around whether or not the entity is sentient. If it's a residual being, they tend to do things on a loop, like they're a skipping record just playing out the same event over and over again infinitely. However, if it is indeed aware of what's going on in present time, you could technically ask it, but it needs to show itself for that to happen. That doesn't seem to be happening here. I can see ghosts, and I can talk to them if they want to talk to me, but I'm no intuitive. I can't sense things about them; my gifts are more tangible than that.”

I thought about what she'd said, digesting the facts and working the angles over and over again in my mind. I came to only one conclusion.

“So you're saying that unless this thing wants to talk to us, or we can find some looney tune/voodoo master to tell us what it's thinking, we're basically screwed.”

“Yep,” she said, taking a bite of her lollipop. “Proper fucked as the Brits would say.” Peyta seemed entirely too pleased with her little addition to my observation.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Language, young lady!”

She rolled her eyes and put her bag under the counter. She appeared to be taking everything in stride, so I left it alone.

“Why are you here so early? Shouldn't you be at school now?” I asked.

“Early release day,” she mumbled.

“Oh, okay. Well, I have dance tonight so I won't be around,” I reminded her. “You may want to start tracking Cooper down now to make sure he's home.”

If my wits had been about me earlier instead of in CF hell, I'd have called him to remind him myself. I settled for a text, and let Peyta call. Maybe he'll get the point if we both harass him.

* * *

The rest of the afternoon was totally unremarkable. No customers, no phone calls, and no ghosts. Peyta manged to finally get hold of Cooper shortly before I was to leave. She said he sounded groggy, like she woke him up, but he promised to get over to the store ASAP. I hovered around, continually glancing at the clock, awaiting his arrival. Minutes ticked by and I needed to leave, but Cooper still hadn't shown.

“Just go, Ruby. You're going to be late,” Peyta said for the fifth time. “I'll be fine. He said he'd be right over so I'm sure he will be.”

I looked at her dubiously, not in love with her idea.

“I really don't think it's wise, especially after my little incident,” I reminded her.

“What can happen in the next five minutes, really?”

“I'm learning that it's best not to ask questions like that of the universe,” I told her. “You may not like its sense of irony.”

She tilted her head to the side and frowned. Her body language said that she thought I was patronizing her, but my hesitation was in her best interest. Whatever slammed into me earlier wasn't friendly and I couldn't have it on my conscience if it did the same to her.

“Ruby, I've dealt with the paranormal all my life. You can't be around me 24/7 forever,” she pleaded. “Please, just go. You're going to be late.”

That was the truth; I was already ten minutes behind schedule.

“Call him again,” I told her, thinking maybe he was held up.

“I'll call him now,” she promised, “But just go. If anything weird starts happening, I'll close up early and head out.”

I didn't like the plan one bit and I told her so – six times to be exact. She mocked me while she flipped her phone open to redial Cooper's number. I hesitated at the door to see if she reached him, but she shooed me away, literally, shoving me out the door of my own store with a smile on her face.

She's going to give me gray hair.

The TT and I made up for lost time on the way down, primarily because of a break in traffic and my heavily leaded foot. I walked in the door just as formal warm ups were getting under way, and after a quick change in the bathroom, I found a spot in the back of the studio next to Matty. He was looking especially buff in a tight white t-shirt and hospital scrubs so threadbare they looked translucent. I'd always acknowledged that Matty was a good-looking kid, but there was something about him that night that was different, manly. His boyish charm seemed swapped out by something more mature and alluring; I was completely fascinated.

Let the interrogations begin.

“So Matty, what's up with the hot cabana boy look?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, looking away to hide his rosying cheeks.

“You look different,” I said as a mischievous smile crossed my face.

“You look the same.”

“Is it a girl?”

He said nothing.

Jackpot.

“It is a girl, isn't it?” I asked again, completely self-impressed that I'd come to the conclusion so easily.

“Maybe,” he said, moving to get up.

“No you don't,” I said, grabbing his arm to keep him on the floor beside me. “Tell me about her.” I looked over at him while I positioned myself in a seated straddle stretch and laid my torso over my right leg. He looked over at me with an odd expression.

“It's not a big deal, Ruby. Let's talk about something else. How's Gravity these days?” he asked, referring to Sean.

“Ugh, I agree, let's talk about something else.”

I was dying to know about the girl in Matty's life who'd awakened the man within, but not enough to have to rehash the Sean debacle.

“You were cutting it kinda close tonight, weren't you?” he asked. “What gives?”

“Cooper, as usual.”

“Ah,” he said, bending forward over his legs, wrapping his hands around the soles of his feet. He left the unspoken “the guy's a total junkie” hanging in the air.

I'd completely forgotten that Matty didn't know how right he was about Cooper, but I didn't think that going into a long-winded monologue about him while we lined up to do plies at the barre was entirely appropriate, so I gave him the abbreviated version.

“You were right about him. I caught him right after you dropped me off that night,” I said, dropping the bomb. I was vague enough that nobody around us would know what we were talking about, which made me feel better in case they met Cooper after all this nonsense was through, but Matty read my message loud and clear.

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, Matty, I'm sorry too.”

* * *

After a surprisingly easy class of choreography and a discussion about what the theme for our next show would be, we finished about thirty minutes early. As I was gathering my things to leave, Shannon, one of the other girls in class, suggested that we go out for the night. I ignored her comment, figuring she wasn't really talking to me anyways and packed up my bag.

“So are you coming?” she asked. My back was to her while I jammed my jeans into my duffel. I turned around to see that she actually was speaking directly to me.

“You're asking me?” I said, unable to hide my surprise.

“Yeah, don't you wanna go?” she asked, looking moderately disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm.

“Um, yeah…yeah, sure I can go,” I responded, thinking that it was the first time in a long time that I'd been asked to go anywhere. I couldn't stop the smile from spreading across my face. “Where exactly are we going?”

“Most of us are going to have to go home to change, but we're going to meet up at a club downtown around eleven-ish. Do you have other clothes with you?”

“Yeah, I'm good,” I said, thanking myself for dressing up for work that day. My killer vintage jeans, courtesy of Ronnie, gorgeous off-the-shoulder knit top and favorite knee-high boots were completely club-worthy. We hadn't worked up enough of a sweat in class to be worried about a shower; I figured I'd probably sweat more once we got to the club. My makeup was minimal and my hair was classic Ruby – curly and unmanageable.